engineers-from-the-united-kingdom

"Our shared ambition is clear: we all want to see Manchester United back where we belong, at the very top of English, European and world football."

"America today is self sufficient in oil and gas... and it is because of this new technology, which is extremely safe and well proven. With the demise of huge swathes of manufacturing in the north of England, expansion of the fracking industry would be a big creator of jobs."

"You can't have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It's costing too much money. The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn't it?"

"The general public still doesn’t see engineers in the way it does doctors or lawyers. You see doctors and lawyers portrayed on television and in fiction, but engineering only has visibility in documentary formats, so Inwed has an important role to promote the profession.”"

"Engineering is harder to get into as a girl. Schools will generally funnel girls towards law or medicine"

"It is important to remember that still only 16% of the engineering workforce are women but in society, women make up 51% of the population"

"I needed a third module to complete my degree and chose systems engineering, thinking that it was about computer systems,” she says. It was definitely not what she was expecting but in a good way and it moved her career firmly into the engineering sector. It is clear she now thrives on the opportunities engineering offers."

"Teachers and parents don’t see engineers in society. Most people who become engineers already have a family member in the industry"

"The Ghaghar river . . . does not in the heaviest season pass in force beyond Bhatnir . . . and the period when this river ceased to flow as one is far beyond record, and belongs to the fabulous periods of which even tradition is scanty... What the country about and west of Raneah [Rania, near Sirsa in Haryana] . . . has been, may be inferred from the numerous sites of towns and villages scattered over a tract, where now fixed habitations are hardly to be met with. I allude only to the vicinity of the bed of the Ghaghar, with which I am personally acquainted;—when the depopulation took place, I am not prepared to say; it must have been long since, as none of the village sites present[s] one brick standing on another, above ground,—though, in digging beneath it, very frequent specimens of an old brick are met with, about 16 inches by 10 inches, and 3 inches thick, of most excellent quality: buildings erected of such materials could not have passed away in any short period. The evident cause of this depopulation of the country is the absolute absence of water . . ."

"The manufacturing efforts required in China to reach this high production throughput (20 million vaccinated per week in) are tremendous."

"If a ship runs into a large bridge, destroying both the bridge and ship, , it is very difficult to see what either the naval architect or the bridge designer could have been expected to do about it from the structural point of view. The problem is not one for the structural engineer but for the local Pilotage Association. Again, aircraft cannot be designed to be flown into mountains."

"There are always a few people for whom the most obvious sequences of technical cause and effect have no meaning."

"In the course of a long professional life spent, or misspent, in the study of the strengths of materials and structures, I have had cause to examine a lot of accidents, many of them fatal. I have been forced to the conclusion that very few accidents just "happen" in a morally neutral way. Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by more or less abstruse technical effects, but by old-fashioned human sin — often verging on plain wickedness. Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud, or Sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won't-learn-and-don't-need-to-ask, you-can't-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people."

"The immediate technical cause of was the tearing of the fabric of the outer envelope; this fabric had apparently been embrittled by improper doping treatment. The real reason for the disaster was, however, pride and jealousy and political ambition."

"Used with caution, such formulae really are very useful indeed, and indeed they form the professional stock-in-trade of most engineering designers and draughtsmen. There is not the slightest need to be ashamed of using them; in fact we all do. But they must be used with caution."

"It is confidence which causes accidents and worry which prevents them."

"It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the 'man-in-the-street'. Basic ideas which have become enshrined in popular language cannot be wholly foolish or unwarranted. For that sort of canonization must mean, at least, that the notions in question have stood the test of numerous centuries and have been accorded unhesitating acceptance wherever speech has made its way."

"Reasoning is a retrospective business—the judging of a present situation in the light of past experience."

"We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before we can hope to advance to a broader understanding."

"We have now arrived within introductory range of that very meek-spirited creature known to modern science as the "Observer". It is a permanent obstacle in the path of our search for external reality that we can never entirely get rid of this individual. Picture the universe how we may, the picture remains of our making."

"Now, when we say of any occurrence that it is 'physical', we mean thereby that it is potentially describable in physical terms. (Otherwise the expression would be wholly meaningless.) So it is perfectly correct, to state that, in every happening with which our sensory nerves are associated, we find, after we have abstracted therefrom every known or imaginable physical component, certain categorically nonphysical residua."

"But the facts are unquestioned. The aeroplane does do these things, and if the theory does not give warranty for the practice, then it is the theory which is wrong."

"The postulation of a principle of causality, “to every effect there is a cause,” has been a continuing central problem for philosophy (Popper, 1972). Its role as a source of contention in modern science (Jauch, 1973) is epitomized by Einstein’s remark that, “I can’t believe that God plays dice.” Many of the arguments about the application of the principle are very relevant to systems science and to problems of system identification and machine learning, on the one hand,and to epistemology and behavioural psychology, on the other. In current system science the theory of causal deterministic systems is most well developed and generally applied, while the theory of modeling with alternative structures, e.g., stochastic automata, indeterminate automata, products of asynchronous automata, etc., has not been developed to the same degree."

"The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when Wells was promoting the concept of a "World Brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopaedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge. He remarks: "our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before." (Wells, 1938)"

"Principle of causality is fundamental to human thinking, and it has been observed experimentally that this assumption leads to complex hypothesis formation by human subjects attempting to solve comparatively simple problems involving a causal randomly generated events"

"Models of human reasoning are clearly relevant to a wide variety of subject areas such as sociology, economics, psychology, artificial intelligence and man-machine systems. Broadly there are two types: psychological models of what people actually do; and formal models of what logicians and philosophers feel a rational individual would, or should, do. The main problem with the former is that it is extremely difficult to monitor thought processes - the behaviourist approach is perhaps reasonable with rats but a ridiculously inadequate source of data on man - the introspectionist approach is far more successful [e.g. in analysing human chess strategy... but the data obtained is still incomplete and may not reflect the actual thought processes involved."

"Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies."

"Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose...The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994)."

"s have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web."